Artists – How Search Engines Work

I’ll never forget meeting a woman whose husband is an artist.  She helps him with the business side of being an artist, and has built a website for him and some of his artist friends in the community.  She was so convinced that her websites could do as good a job as any third party, online art gallery.  Her thoughts were…why would anyone pay a commission to participate in an online program with other artists when they can have their own websites and sell from them?  Again, we had found yet another person who didn’t understand the Internet.   She could build a website, but didn’t understand the first thing about how the artist or their work could ever get found with it.

Artists should maintain websites as a place to organize and present their art to potential customers.  But as we’ve said before, the chances of anyone finding an artist’s website that they were not told about are slim.

Let’s consider some of the ways people can find your website on the Internet.

• Direct Traffic – Someone puts in your website name (URL – example www.yourname.com) to go to your website; that is called “direct” traffic. 
• Organic Traffic – Someone “Googles” your name and your website comes up in the search, and the customer then clicks on the search results to get to your website; that is called “organic” search traffic.

Someone “Googles” an art related term such as “buy original art”.  If you are lucky enough to have effectively used those key words in your page titles, descriptions, and key word phrases (not used too much anymore) you may come up in the organic search results.  I say “may” because hundreds of other artists and web businesses are also targeting those keywords.  Several factors determine how high on the list you rank.  Things such as how long you have owned your domain name, how much traffic your website gets, the number of inbound links your website has, how many pages have been categorized by the search engine, and more. So you see if you don’t have all of these things, the chances of you ranking in the first 9 (page 1) are slim.  Because of the number of competitors you have for that organic search term, it is highly unlikely that you will even show up in the top 100.

So now you understand why you have little chance of being found by someone looking in the organic search results listings unless the person is searching is looking for a very unique key word title, description or phrase such as the artists name.  But even that won’t work very well if your name is Tom Cruise for example because the first hundred or so results will already have been taken by others who are using the actor’s name to attract people to their websites.

So what can you do?  The next two methods for being found are your only real options, but this next one only works if you have a lot of money to invest in the promotion of your artwork.

• Google CPC Advertising (Cost-per-Click) – With Google Adwords, people can actually buy placement at the very top and on the right margin for any search term.  This area has been reserved by Google as the place for “sponsored) links, which is how Google makes all their money.  Placement depends upon how much money you are willing to “bid” for that space.  This allows people who really want to be found to be seen even though they may not have enough of those other things working for them to show up in the organic search area.  When someone clicks on one of these sponsored links to get to your website, they are called “non-organic” or paid search traffic.  The advertisers typically are charged a fee each time someone clicks on their ad (pay-per-click).
• Referral Traffic – The best opportunity you have to help people discover your website and artwork on the Internet is by establishing links.  A link is when one website “refers” traffic to yours via a clickable word, phrase, or website address that is physically linked to your website’s address.  Getting other websites to provide links to yours is extremely important, and the most effective thing as an individual artist you can to do promote yourself online.

There are a few opportunities you already have to create links.  These links can be created to take people to your own website, to your page with a third party online gallery, or to wherever your artwork can be seen and purchased.  You can and should create these links on pages you control like your MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  You can also create links by sharing links with your artist friends.  Additionally, posting comments on art related blogs and contributing content to other people’s websites can also provide you with exposure that very easily can turn into website traffic.  Don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of the links you are able to secure.  They can be extremely powerful.

Short of working with a larger more established online gallery, establishing links is by far the most effective way you can promote your artwork via your own website!  Although it will take some time for you to build up your links, the investment only requires your time and it is the absolute best thing you can do to generate new traffic to your website.